I completely agree! At MathZee, we develop educational software for preschool and kindergarten kids, and in our focus-group tests, kids find the iPad and iPod Touch many times more intuitive than a computer. So much so that we now first develop the iPad and iPod Touch version of our educational games.

I love Dropbox. It does it's job well and quietly. However, you are correct that this is not a very secure solution. Although Dropbox claims encryption for transfer and storage, the keys used for transfer and storage are Dropbox's. So, Dropbox employees can still see your docs. And considering that this discussion is about the "Home Directories," I wouldn't be very happy with that level of security.
I know that one can use TrueCrypt to work around this problem.. but then you need to remember to mount / dismount the TrueCrypt drive anytime you make changes to your documents. Not a very good solution either.

In theory, with support for Canvas, Audio/Video tags etc, HTML 5 does seem like a better option than Silverlight (and even Flash, for most purposes). But when you consider that not even IE 8 will support these elements from HTML 5, and that a huge part of the userbase still uses (and will continue to use) IE7 / IE6, it doesn't take much to realize that we won't be seeing developers leaving Flash for HTML 5 anytime soon.

Seriously though, if you manage to stop these top spammers, then before you say, "Good riddance," new players will take up their space. If there's opportunity in this space, people will keep coming. There's no way you can get rid of spammers by stopping a handful of people.. however big they are in the spamming world.